THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 16th Annual Shorty Awards

Downhill Dreams

Entered in Documentary, Storytelling

Objectives

The objective of this film was to inspire the local community where Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corporation is located to get involved and donate to local charities, like the Boys and Girls Club. The employees volunteered to work with kids who don't get opportunities often to help design, build, and race their own soap box cars, all while bringing the community together to support these kids. Not only did it inspire the community to get involved and donate, but it also inspired kids to work at a company like Yamaha, seeing the process of the automotives they build everyday and experiencing it themselves. 

Strategy and Execution

We filmed every part of the whole process, every workshop, from start to finish. We filmed the engineers at Yamaha helping the kids design their cars, we filmed them building their cars and getting hands on, we filmed them test driving them and making little changes to make them ride better, and then we filmed them racing their cars in front of the whole community who came out to support them. We also interviewed community members, employees, and the students who participated in the program, and heard different perspectives on what this meant to them and how it made an impact. Not many companies provide opportunites like this for kids at such a young age to work directly with engineers and inspiring them to have a career they might not know they could have. Not only did this have an inspiration aspect to the film, but we also filmed their cars as if they were race cars, and made them look epic to give them a sense of imagination and accomplishment. 

Results

The charities raised more money than they anticipated and they had a much larger crowd who attended the race than they expected. This was the first annual race, and they already had more people wanting to sign up for next year. Our goal was to inspire, and that's exactly what this film did. 

Media

Video for Downhill Dreams

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Bleu Lion Media, Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corporation

Link

Entry Credits